November 24, 2015

It's a 7-minute clip that pays -- I'm usually skeptical -- Grady Moquin and Shane Brown did New York for Village Psychic putting together the proper out-of-towners non-tourist clip. Digging the endurance on those two, and their friends, including one of Quim Cardona's better showings in a while.

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Chicago skateboarding has always struck me as having some "what we do is secret" vibes. Uprise put out a video about a year ago and while I'd love to watch it far more than most of the stuff that's easier to find, I've yet been afforded an opportunity to peep it. The unknown past is sometimes as interesting as the recent present -- enter the excellent IG account of Wing Ko.

The clips above are from the Ko directed movie called The Brotherhood: Chicago and while it appears the scheduled showings were exhausted about two weeks ago, I'd love to see that thing sometime in Minne. Poke around Ko's Instagram to see lots of seemingly timeless skateboarding clips. The 16mm film format definitely helps -- the clips are clear and vividly life-like, a trait I'd forgotten about skateboard celluloid -- and those Chicago dudes like Jesse Neuhaus and Stevie Dread skate with some serious power and all that. Eric Murphy, before I witnessed him on IG, was total surprise. Chicago in '92 looked dope.

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As brought up in the comments of the last post, Clint Peterson's kickflip -- going but not turning frontside into the Lair's bowl -- was a true bowl-burner, tho. Heroics in that part of that bowl remind me of Consolidated sponsored guy Jackson Taylor's move from inside. He did a rather large frontside flip from shallow to deep at some long since passed demo; I asked him if he was the Cube's TM in an embarrassing aside, after. He was gracious. A single Google search turned up this bit on Taylor; while it's obviously old, there are decent narratives to be found.

November 20, 2015

About a month ago a piece I did for Ride Channel was published -- it was all about searching for lost tricks. Or figuring out where they go or why, beyond getting older and not skating and all the very real reasons, on some conjectured metaphysical level. It was fun. One thing that Randy Ploesser told me about where the lost tricks go started metaphysically but moved into thoughts on the passage of time:

MM: What happens to lost tricks?

RP: Where do they go? I think maybe they transfer spiritually to another person, and it’s like a power-suck kind of thing. The older you get, all the youthful energy just transfers to the youth and they get all your moves. You know how they got ‘em: They can only do it because someone was doing it before them, for the most part. Someone’s getting them.

The can only do it because someone was doing it before them...

Pretty simple concept, yeah? It's progression in a direction, motivated by factors outside the individual. A week or so back I was listening to the Longform Podcast with Ed Caesar on it. He, among other things, has written about long distance runners -- marathoners and the like -- diving into the psychological and scientific factors of what the limits of the human body really are. A part of what he's trying to nail down is just how fast a marathon can be run. Here's a bit from a Guardian review of Caesar's book, "Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon" that sums up where the speeds/times began, and where they are now:

"In the past two or three decades, marathon record times have been falling. In 1896, at the first modern marathon, only the winning runner managed to complete the distance in less than three hours. As Caesar points out, any old amateur club runner can do that now. Not that long ago, for elite runners, the very idea of finishing in two hours and six minutes was like science fiction. Now it is almost commonplace - but two hours and (just under) three minutes seems to be the current limit of human longdistance capability."

That line about "any old amateur club runner* can do that now" strikes me as fitting in with "everybody's good." The baseline is higher and it's believable at its current level. The folks who stand out then, are the ones who, like Ploesser said, are the ones doing things first. It's mysterious how that happens. Speaking on the podcast, Caesar cited an interesting study conducted in the northeast of England. That's how specific he got; my transcription here:

“Cyclists were made to race against their personal bests, but the scientists had fooled them. Because the avatar that they were racing they thought represented their personal best, but in fact it was 2 percent faster and all of them beat the avatar. So they went more than 2 percent faster than their personal best because they were trying to beat their personal best -- in fact they made a huge improvement. There was no way that they thought they could race that time; they thought it was possible to just beat their personal best, instead they’d gone way past it.”

How do we best fool ourselves? Another Caesar line from the audio: "Our brains are telling us weird stuff all the time and its because our brains don’t want us to die."

With that in mind one wonders how Pat Duffy overcame to do all that shit 25 years ago, if he's indeed not a malfunctioning cybernetic organism.